Page:Biographical and critical miscellanies (IA biographicalcrit00presrich).pdf/664

638 tongues; and their language, derived both from the Latin and the Teutonic idiom, affords them a much greater facility for entering into the spirit of foreign letters than can be enjoyed by any other European people, whose language is derived almost exclusively from one or the other of these elements. With all these peculiar facilities for literary history and criticism, why, with their habitual freedom of thought, have they remained in it, so far behind most other cultivated nations?